can still hear their cries, the little kids screaming.”
The war destroyed everything in North Korea. American bombings leveled factories, hospitals, schools, roads, homes, dams, farms, and government offices; by 1952, there was nothing left to bomb. As Armstrong argued, the three years of B-29 raids—and the fear of Washington’s potential use of the atomic bomb—were etched deeply into the collective consciousness of North Koreans, and this sense of anxiety and fear of outside threats would continue for decades after the war. Millions of people were displaced, families searched desperately for missing loved ones, and orphans cried over their parents’ lifeless bodies as barely pubescent teens found themselves responsible for their younger siblings. The July 1953 cease-fire brought a close to the fighting—which Kim claimed the United States had ignited—but technically left the two Koreas at war to this day and made permanent the cruel separation of families.
While people lived in tunnels and caves to escape the bombings, Kim Il Sung was busy packaging the devastation and death as a victory in the “Fatherland Liberation War,” claiming success in expelling the U.S. imperialists and South Korean toadies who “trampled underfoot and burnt everything in all quarters…butchered innocent people en masse [and] kicked children and pregnant women into the flames and buried old folks alive.” If there was failure, it wasn’t his fault but that of those who were not sufficiently faithful to the revolutionary spirit as embodied in his Manchurian guerrilla experience. The North Korean people believed this. They had witnessed and suffered through the attacks and trusted that their only savior was Kim Il Sung. But then again, they had no choice but to accept the regime’s account and to help rebuild the country.
So, by the time he turned forty, according to the regime narrative, Kim Il Sung had been solely responsible for ousting the Japanese imperialists from the Korean Peninsula. He had routed the American “jackals” and the South Korean “puppets” in Seoul, wrapping himself in savior mythology. Sung-Yoon Lee, a professor at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, wrote that Kim Il Sung “even in failing to achieve his ultimate goal—liberate the South and unify the peninsula under his rule—profoundly ‘revised’ the geostrategic importance of the Korean Peninsula from a minor, forgotten outpost on the tip of the Asian mainland to a major powder keg on a key strategic strip of land in Northeast Asia.” Lee added that Kim’s belligerent approach over the decades of his rule only inspired his patrons in Beijing and Moscow to “placate him with bigger blandishments.”
Kim Il Sung also certainly learned some valuable lessons from the Korean War. The United States now considered the Korean Peninsula a strategic national security interest, determining that it would defend South Korea with military force, if necessary. It also became apparent that China would fight back against U.S. encroachment. Kim now realized that North Korea’s position among China, the Soviet Union, and the United States presented him with an opportunity to turn the powerful players against one another to Pyongyang’s advantage.
Yet the disastrous war and his country’s reliance on China—which took leadership of the conflict and stationed forces in North Korea until 1958—required Kim to intensify his efforts to cement his control. In the mid- to late 1950s, Kim reinforced his campaign to make himself the sole leader of North Korea, purging suspected challengers for “disloyalty” and wiping out mention of the role of the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army in defending the regime, while purging, exiling, or executing pro-China and pro-Soviet officials. The backing of Joseph Stalin had made it easier for Kim to create a highly personalized autocracy, but the denunciation by the new Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, of his predecessor’s personality cult, reign of terror, and failed policies augured problems for Kim. As documented by the Russian scholar Andrei Lankov, in 1956, during what would be the only significant internal challenge to Kim Il Sung, top North Korean party members aligned with the post-Stalin Soviet Union and China united to condemn Kim for his amassing of power, accusing him of being responsible for straying from socialism for his personal benefit. When Kim continued to purge his opposition, Moscow and Beijing further intervened by sending a delegation to press Kim to reverse the purge and restore his government’s pro-Soviet and pro-China North Korean blocs. But that just gave Kim the latitude to label his opponents as factionalists and therefore tainted by foreign influence.